Our first stop on the 30th of July would be in Lowell, Massachusetts, to touch base with Jack Kerouac, who both Chris and I had envied at different times in our lives. Chris had his own experience “on the road” when he drove out West from his home on the East Coast after getting his undergraduate degree. I mean, what writer or lover or literature doesn’t at some point come across the beats and fall in love watching the beauty of the best minds of that generation express their madness? Known for his spontaneous style of prose, where he’d get focused and sit at a typewriter and pour out his stories in a gorgeous and poetic stream of consciousness that mesmerizes, Kerouac remains a legend. Stunningly (though contrary to myth), he did revise after the fact. He also rehearsed quite a bit in his head before sitting down for these notoriously caffeine or booze or drug induced bursts of productivity. He aimed create jazz from his work, and leaned on the guidance of Eastern ideas around mindfulness and attention to fuel his creativity. He loved his typewriter, preferring it to longhand. He constantly jotted down notes as he went about his day. He was also a nocturnal writer. Kerouac’s prose was less formal than most writing of the time. It invited new voices to the table by using the language of the street.
Among other things, Lowell is home to old buildings with scattered cobblestone streets, and grime. So much grime. We stopped for breakfast at this coffee shop in Lowell that had great coffee, excellent menu items. I had a Peace, Love, and Happiness Wrap and Chris had a vegan breakfast sandwich. The service was great, but the place didn’t care one bit what you thought of how it looked. Dead plants hung from the ceiling. The floors needed to be refinished twenty years ago. The walls looked they had never been washed.
We found the Kerouac mural and Kerouac Park. We tried to visit The Jack Kerouac Center but, in exploring their website and researching further, came to understand that it only yet exists in the minds of the planners, namely one country musician Zach Bryan who bought a property in Lowell to host the project in 2022. The future center that has stalled due to funding issues has an honorable mission and will be housed in the church where Kerouac served as an altar boy and where his funeral was held. There is a button on their website linked above, should you feel so moved.
Home to several vagrants, Jack Kerouac Park sat right next to an almost totally dry stream full of debris, including plastic piping and a grocery cart. In the park proper, there stood huge marble slabs with passages from Kerouac’s works that we struggled to read due to moss growing into the engraved words.
Feeling a little grimy, anticipating the promised mid-90s heat of the day already coming on, we spent the first part of the next leg of our drive in silence. For myself I can say that I needed a moment to take it all in. So much of our visit to New England had been neat little towns and registered historical houses and volunteer docents, quite unlike what we’d seen in Lowell. Even when Kerouac lived there, Lowell was an industrial city in decline. And yet, there are murals all over the place, and creativity seems ready to sprout from the sidewalks. Maybe that’s a bit of magical thinking on my part. It left me in stunned silence for a beat.
We traveled on and visited two writers in two different towns where the stop really consisted of standing outside old houses and taking pictures. We also read bits of their works and talked about them.
The first of those two writers was John Greenleaf Whittier in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Whittier was a quaker and abolitionist who believed in the power of poetry to change hearts and minds. We read two of Whittier’s works sitting outside The John Greenleaf Whittier Home and Museum (only open Saturdays; we were there Wednesday). We read “Snow-Bound” and “The Barefoot Boy” and noticed the parts we admired: the rhythm and rhyme, the potent imagery, the choice of a single word. He was one of the most popular poets of the nineteenth century but continued to live simply and modestly with the goal of poetry as activism.
The second stop was the Sarah Orne Jewett House in South Berwick, Maine. Jewett is known for her character-driven, regionalist fiction. Right away, I wondered whether she’d had an influence on my favorite living writer from Maine, Elizabeth Strout. So, I looked it up. Nope, not one mention of the name. Only Updike, Turgenev, Trevor, and Munro. We parked behind a car with a Save America Again Trump bumper sticker, parked across from the quaintest marijuana shop one could ever imagine. More on marijuana and coffee shops in Mainw in a future post!
This being a Thursday, according to the website, the house should have been open for tours on the hour. No such luck. So, we traveled on, and I read aloud “The White Heron” as we headed to Portland. It’s a story whose feminism sneaks up on you, about a curious young girl who becomes enamored with a visiting young ornithologist/taxidermist in search of an elusive white heron. I won’t give it away; you’ll just have to read it. Another morning writer (so far, the early risers are outnumbering the night owls), Jewett found a mentor in William Dean Howells. Letter writing, for her (like so many others) was an extension of her creative practice. She preferred to write only when inspired and not to force the work.
Our final destination was Portland, Maine. We landed at the Wadsworth-Longfellow House with a couple of hours to spare. The tour was self-guided but there was a docent on each floor happy to answer any questions we had (or didn’t even yet know we had). According to the second-floor docent, Longfellow’s popularity might be compared to the level of Stephen King today. He enjoyed huge financial success. His good friend and mentor Nathaniel Hawthorne, less so. Perhaps it was the randomness of how fame is meted out to writers that inspired Longfellow to write a check to the Hawthorne’s widow every month after Hawthorne’s death.
One of the most popular poets of the nineteenth century, Longfellow rose early and did not wait for inspiration to strike. He showed up to write whether compelled to or not. He wrote longhand, with a quill pen. His poems were narrative, and sometimes historical. He understood and sought to appeal to his audience. He maintained correspondences with Hawthorne and Charles Dickens, among other writers. We’ve left the age of letter correspondence, and I wonder now as I have many times before what we left behind. I love, love, love a good letter. But it’s not the pace at which our world of read receipts moves.
The second-floor docent encouraged us to make our next and last stop be Print: A Bookstore, and that it would not disappoint. The store, he said, was owned by the daughter of Rick Russo, which took us a beat to figure out who he meant, since as mere readers we only knew him as Richard. He listed some other Portland writers we should check out, including Elizabeth Strout. We ended the day with a trip to a bookstore and a recommended and longed-for lobster roll spot before we made a stop at the Portland Co-Op for provisions (including lemon fennel ice cream and a raspberry rhubarb hand pie for dessert), then checked in at our cozy downtown Airbnb.
A whirlwind of a day, thinking about writers and their habits and influence, what drove them, what made them popular or not. Thinking also about how these places bear the mark of those who once wrote there, as their works reflect place and time in a reciprocity that leads to historically registered houses, parks, murals, bookstores, statues, and museums yet to come.
I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.